PDF Editor Alternatives, Preferably Open Source
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I've never found anything capable and open source. Foxit has an editor I liked as does Nitro but both cost money. I'll keep an eye on this thread though.
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@coliver said in PDF Editor Alternatives, Preferably Open Source:
I've never found anything capable and open source. Foxit has an editor I liked as does Nitro but both cost money. I'll keep an eye on this thread though.
I used to like those, but bleh.
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LibreOffice Draw seems to have added some features. Maybe it will be enough.
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@jaredbusch said in PDF Editor Alternatives, Preferably Open Source:
@scottalanmiller said in PDF Editor Alternatives, Preferably Open Source:
@computerchip said in PDF Editor Alternatives, Preferably Open Source:
Have you tried out AbleWord?
Haven't even heard of it.
Because it is dead.
No updates since 2015. Requires .Net 2/3.5 be enabled
I still use notepad all the time and it's the same interface and functions as it did 15 years ago. I wouldn't call it dead.
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If you want to keep it simple, if you head over to ninite.com they have:
Foxit Reader
Alternative PDF Reader 9.0.1.1049
LibreOffice
Free Office Suite 6.0.2 (JRE recommended)
SumatraPDF
Lightweight PDF Reader 3.1.2
CutePDF
Print Documents as PDF Files 3.2
PDFCreator
Print Documents as PDF Files 3.1.2.10844
OpenOfficeI have a side question, is this for the legal industry or just general use? I use to work in legal industry with a few leading firms with as a billed out MSP model to companies who didn't want to handle those types of services internally. I played with PDF's professionally at scale. We are talking 100K to 1M + in documents management. While I like how the pdf format is open per se to other vendors using it, there are sometimes quirks that happen with PDFs especially when someone is using a passworded version or a version done at a high level but someone with a low level version trying to use it and last but not least conversion issues especially when trying to convert from say a crazy windows doc / docx to pdf.
In my opinion, I prefer to working in Google then save to pdf
which eliminates most of the issues (short of formatting) but for those few times I have to actually edit and manipulate them, Acrobat is tried at true but Sumatra PDF & PDF Nitro are also my go to. -
@krisleslie said in PDF Editor Alternatives, Preferably Open Source:
If you want to keep it simple, if you head over to ninite.com they have:
Foxit Reader
Alternative PDF Reader 9.0.1.1049
LibreOffice
Free Office Suite 6.0.2 (JRE recommended)
SumatraPDF
Lightweight PDF Reader 3.1.2
CutePDF
Print Documents as PDF Files 3.2
PDFCreator
Print Documents as PDF Files 3.1.2.10844
OpenOfficeMost of those are readers, though. Foxit, for example, to edit is $130.
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@krisleslie said in PDF Editor Alternatives, Preferably Open Source:
I have a side question, is this for the legal industry or just general use?
General, it is sales people requesting it.
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Ah well I'll take one for from your playbook you gave me
consider possibly hosting Adobe Acrobat in RDS. I think I did about a year ago and worked fine from my Chromebook. Otherwise I hate Adobe's pricing. Even for me being a non profit they cap us off and still charge us premium rate for Acrobat. At best I'm able to get cost around $50-75 but with caveats, aka being forced to use the online service, not the actual desktop app. -
I still have a version about 10 years old in the office!
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As an suggestion also ignore using those free websites that convert them to word docs. Some actually do a great job. But some end up creating crap from their output. We tried that 2-3 years ago. Some folks (less than 3) still clamor on to that method, but in my office as much as possible I try to keep our data in a database which can export to word or pdf as necessary. I know I know different topic you want to open/edit them
not just view. -
We've got someone testing out LibreOffice Draw 6 now, to see how much of what they need it will do.
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@scottalanmiller said in PDF Editor Alternatives, Preferably Open Source:
We've got someone testing out LibreOffice Draw 6 now, to see how much of what they need it will do.
Its pretty slow for me when loading a pdf document with a lot of pages. And the text on some of the pages is not formatted correctly.
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Scott it will work but your mileage will vary. There is more than one kind of PDF version so it really depends on the source of where you "pulling" the pdfs from. Are they PDF's they are getting from other companies (like marketing stuff) that they wanna pull data out of? Those are the worst usually.
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@krisleslie said in PDF Editor Alternatives, Preferably Open Source:
Scott it will work but your mileage will vary. There is more than one kind of PDF version so it really depends on the source of where you "pulling" the pdfs from. Are they PDF's they are getting from other companies (like marketing stuff) that they wanna pull data out of? Those are the worst usually.
I don't really have a good idea of what the use case is, yet.
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I use Master PDF
It's a cross platform PDF editor for macOS, Windows and Linux.
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@fateknollogee thank you sir!
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I’ve done it with Inkscape before. That’s not too bad.
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@stacksofplates said in PDF Editor Alternatives, Preferably Open Source:
I’ve done it with Inkscape before. That’s not too bad.
I noticed a lot of sites recommending that, as well.
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I've used pdftk and pdfsam for merging before.
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I recommend PDFElement as @JaredBusch noted and Pdf Architect. They both work well at a decent price. Foxit Reader allows you to comment PDF like a lot of other tools but those are my recommendations.
